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Apple can delete purchased movies from your library without telling you

515 points by Y-bar 8y ago

seymour333 8y ago
Just wait until Amazon changes the content of your books without telling you
- icebraining 8y ago
  You mean the Automatic Book Updates feature on the Kindle?
  - seymour333 8y ago
    No, I mean a super crazy conspiracy theory where Amazon changes the content of books to better fit some acquired set of political or ideological views
    - masklinn 8y ago
      So… exactly what Amazon's automatic book update can do, just hasn't yet?
    - buckminster 8y ago
      This is far more likely to happen in settlement of a libel suit, say. It doesn't require any conspiracy.
- satysin 8y ago
  Like when Amazon removed Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindle devices silently? https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
  - seymour333 8y ago
    Yeah that, only instead of removing it, they just spend a few decades turning it into an endorsement
    - dwighttk 8y ago
      Yeah like the Bearenstein bears, amirite?
      - seymour333 8y ago
        They must have spent _years_ printing and aging copies of those books and destroying the originals. You have to admire the dedication
        rc_bhg 8y ago
        Wait, what is this? What happened?
        amyjess 8y ago
        It's a joke. The books are called The Berenstain Bears. Because surnames ending in -stain are extremely rare and surnames ending in -stein are fairly common, a lot of people misremember them as The Berenstein Bears. This has spawned numerous conspiracy theories about the name changing. There is a group of people who seriously believe they've somehow travelled into a parallel universe where the only difference is that a children's book series is named differently. This theory is often referred to as "the Mandela Effect", which is named after how a lot of people mistakenly remember hearing about Nelson Mandela dying years before he actually did (and yes, these people claim that they've accidentally travelled to a parallel universe where the only difference is that Nelson Mandela lived another 15 years). The theory sounds like a joke, but its proponents take it dead seriously, and they've been known to start flamewars over it. As such, a lot of people like to make fun of these conspiracy theories by concocting the most ludicrous theories we can think of.
- bambax 8y ago
  Calibre (unsupported) plugins let you remove DRM from Kindle books, so you actually can save a local copy not connected to Amazon in any way. I keep buying Kindle books while this is still possible, and will stop if it ceases to be.
  - seymour333 8y ago
    Is there currently a single source of truth for the content of books and other written media? Something like a hash of all the contents that can be stored in some indelible way (blockchain maybe?) so that as time passes people can verify that the content has remained the same?
    - chrisco255 8y ago
      Nope, but I imagine you could create one using something like the IPFS protocol: https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/
  - realusername 8y ago
    be careful with sharing books you got with this method. The Calibre plugin does remove the DRM but not the Amazon User ID they embed inside. Keeping it for you is fine, otherwise you need to be more cautious.
    - bambax 8y ago
      I don't share books, I just store them in epub format so that I can read them in Marvin. But thanks for the heads up. Do you know if the Kindle user Id is saved in the epub file when converted with Calibre?
ceejayoz 8y ago
Headline is a bit misleading. From my reading, this isn't Apple reaching into your local library to delete them - if they'd kept the originals they'd still be there. They're just not available for re-download, which is similar to losing a DVD - the store isn't gonna give you another one for free.
- headhuntermdk 8y ago
  Not quite.. it also means that you can't stream it from your library either. So effectively it is the same. This is a cautionary tale for those who are buying iTunes 4k movies and can't stream 4k from a local device on their network https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/21/itunes-4k-content-streaming-only/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/21/itunes-4k-content-strea...
- sramam 8y ago
  I think a more analogous sequence would be: * The store offered to keep a DVD in safe-custody while you moved addresses. * You accepted the deal and shipped them the DVD. * You arrive at the new address, and the store refuses to deliver the DVD. Hence the rankle. [edit] bulleting
- stordoff 8y ago
  Not quite the same, as the implication is that you can stream indefinitely. You _can't_ download 4K videos, for instance.
rajat 8y ago
It does seem obvious that short of having your own copy of something purchased (in this case, a movie), this will happen. Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. I wonder if it's even legal for Apple to maintain a copy of the movie in iTunes for customers who've already purchased it once they have lost the right to host it. Clearly, most of us don't appreciate the difference between what it meant to purchase something, and what it means today in the digital, subscription world. So, if you really want to own a movie or a song, buy a physical incarnation of it, or make a digital copy of it.
- saidajigumi 8y ago
  I wonder if it's even legal for Apple to maintain a copy of the movie in iTunes for customers who've already purchased it once they have lost the right to host it. Actually, I'd put this on Apple legal: the contracts should specify that customer purchases can continue be hosted, and served to those customers in perpetuity. It's possible that Apple didn't have the leverage or foresight to negotiate these terms, but the "fix" here is straightforward because it's an issue of contractual terms, not some notion of "legality".
  - thedaemon 8y ago
    I have purchased many movies on Google Play that are no longer available for purchase. They are still available for me to watch.
- derefr 8y ago
  > Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. I'm pretty sure you could design a SaaS offering in two parts: one that sells you a digital copy of a thing as a product (rather than a license), for delivery to a digital storage locker; and then, the other, a digital storage locker. Oddly enough, Apple already has a digital storage locker, called iCloud Music Library. It's where your uploaded songs go when you use iTunes Match and the song doesn't actually match any entry in the Apple Music library. If iCloud Music Library were properly designed (it's not), your purchased, matched, and uploaded songs would all be available permanently through iCloud Music Library in its capacity as a digital storage locker, whether or not they're still available through Apple Music. The licence-holders wouldn't be able to do anything about this: this isn't Apple broadcasting a song, this is Apple acting as the moral equivalent of bank, offering a safe-deposit box service, where you hold a box into which you've put a USB stick containing the song you bought from them. Sadly, the synergy between Apple Music and iCloud Music Library is actually exactly the opposite of what anyone would want: when an artist's license agreement with Apple Music expires and their tracks are purged from the system, Apple will actually delete not just your purchased licenses from your iCloud Music Library; and not just the licenses of Apple Music tracks that fingerprint-matched local copies you had; but even your uploaded (!) copies of songs by a given artist that didn't match any Apple Music license, but just happened to have ID3 information corresponding to the artist whose rights were expiring. (In that case, the tracks still appear as entries in the iCloud Music Library list, but they're under a permanent "waiting" status, because their backing storage has been removed. There are many support threads about this issue, none with answers—well, that's what's going on.)
Macha 8y ago
This is why I strip the DRM and backup anything I purchase locally, and don't use services that don't have any method to acquire a raw copy (like the google play store). It's a strong selling point if it's provided by the vendor (e.g. GOG for video games), but sadly hollywood is an industry that hates the concept.
- gruez 8y ago
  >and don't use services that don't have any method to acquire a raw copy (like the google play store) are you sure you're not confusing that with the app store? it's trivial to get the .apk from a bought app after it's on your phone, but it's not trivial to strip the playfair DRM off an .ipa.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure the reference is to video content from the Google Play Store, not apps or (even easier to get raw content) audio content from the same store.
    - Macha 8y ago
      Yes, I was talking about the movies on the play store.
  - Splines 8y ago
    > it's trivial to get the .apk from a bought app after it's on your phone I'd argue that while it might be easy today, that's just an implementation detail. The play store does not advertise anywhere that you can backup APKs for installation later in case an app is pulled from the store. Tomorrow Google could invent a new kind of delivery mechanism that makes this stop working.
- rbritton 8y ago
  I purchase a decent amount of digital-only content, and I always strip the DRM off of it. It's relatively easy to do this with content purchased in iTunes.
mbostleman 8y ago
My landlord can put a lock for which I don't have a key on my apartment door without telling me too. The question is not whether he can or can't lock my door. The question is whether or not the terms of our agreement allow him to block my access or not. The fact that people often don't understand the terms of there agreements is definitely a problem, but that's not what the headline implies unfortunately.
- jstanley 8y ago
  But with computers it needn't be that way. Computers allow us the power to be the ultimate masters of our own data. There's no reason to relinquish that power.
  - mbostleman 8y ago
    Presumably you mean with computers you own. The use case in this article involves the data on computers owned by Apple.
- kevin_b_er 8y ago
  Once upon a time that agreement would've been "whenever the owner feels like it". Fortunately laws were passed for tenant rights. We've yet to do the same with abusive contracts of adhesion where you relinquish basic rights to lease a movie until the provider feels like removing it and provide you zero recourse.
  - mbostleman 8y ago
    I have a hard time applying terms like "abusive" to a situation that I entered in to voluntarily and to which all the terms were available to me prior to entering. Unless you mean that I am abusing myself, which is probably accurate.
    - orcdork 8y ago
      So any contract is fair and there is absolutely no chance of coercion or intimidation by a party with an unfair negotiating advantage?
tyingq 8y ago
Frontier did this to me after they took over FIOS from Verizon. No recourse either...I tried several times to fight them. Ended up just dropping them and losing my purchased movies.
JohnTHaller 8y ago
If, say, you'd purchased and downloaded the movie on your iPhone 7 and then the movie was removed from Apple's store, could you then copy the movie to your iPhone 8 when you upgraded? If not, then this is about as far from "owning" a movie as you can get. Remember, if there's cloud-based licensing involved, you're not "buying" anything, you're just leasing.
- asimpletune 8y ago
  Yeah, you could
- robteix 8y ago
  I don't know about movies, but you can definitely lose apps. I used to own a game called X-Plane that I played on my iPad. Then the authors created a new "version" (as a new paid app.) At some point, I reset my iPad and set it up as a new device and there was no way to download the app anymore as it had been removed from the app store. It is still hosted there somewhere, so if you have the backup, it will download the app from the app store, but it is not "findable" so if you have a new device, so sorry.
  - larrik 8y ago
    It should appear in your "Purchased" list in that case.
- djrogers 8y ago
  Yes, as long as you have a digital copy of the movie you can move/copy it to any device tied to your account. The problem here is he did't have a downloaded copy of the movie.
debt 8y ago
Please feel free to enjoy this copyrighted experience. You may purchase or rent or use whichever verbs you deem appropriate to procure this experience, either way, we as the mere provider of such copyrighted experience may have to revoke your access to such experience for reasons both within and without our control. Your purchase may or may not grant you at least a single viewing of the copyrighted experience. Regardless if you have or have not purchased, you may not store or download or copy or backup any portion of the copyrighted experience. Enjoy!
- msla 8y ago
  > copywritten As distinct from copyrighted, then? As usual, people have no sense of humor.
  - zem 8y ago
    the internet is for ads
    - msla 8y ago
      > the internet is for ads ... did you reply to the wrong comment, zem?
      - zem 8y ago
        no, it was a pun on "copywritten"
- anticensor 8y ago
  A new verb would fit: cobuy
jakebasile 8y ago
Steam handles this much better. If a game is removed from sale for some reason people who already purchased it still have access. For example, I still have access to the original Prey even though it's no longer available.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  ESID. All customers of GTA4 had the soundtrack gutted retroactively in April.
- fastball 8y ago
  Sometimes you actually get an improvement. I purchased the original version Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the Steam store. A year or so later, they released the "Director's Cut" of DE:HR. Steam automatically "upgraded" my copy, so now I have the Director's Cut version in my Steam library.
  - discreditable 8y ago
    Same here with Red Faction: Guerrilla, and the Re-mars-tered edition.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Or sometimes it's a downgrade, like with Skyrim SE.
sidstling 8y ago
I view any digital distribution platform where your content is tied to the platform itself as renting rather than buying. Makes things much simpler. That's why it was so disheartening to buy the x-com remake and find nothing but a steam activation code inside the box. I don't feel like I own that game because it's tied to an online account. I know that you can just keep a local copy of it, but it's still tied to the platform and if you wanted to go to a different platform, you couldn't take it with you.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  With iOS it's even worse, because you end up tied to a specific version of the platform. For example: I bought the Monkey Island remake for iOS when it came out. It's no longer playable, because a 64-bit binary was never produced, and 32-bit apps don't work on iOS 11. Similar things happened with computer operating systems, but holding on to an older version is so much easier to do on computers. I guess a 7 year usable life is decent for how much I paid for the game, but still, annoying.
adrian_mrd 8y ago
And Apple can also add non-purchased music albums into your library without telling you too - refer to that debacle involving the U2 album 'Songs of Innocence' from 2014.
robbiemitchell 8y ago
Apple should not be "selling" content for which they do not have a perpetual license to resell. Full stop.
- tantalor 8y ago
  It doesn't really matter if Apple loses the license to distribute it, since you as the purchaser (should) have an irrevocable perpetual license to streaming/download the content. The distributor, who made the content originally available to Apple, is a party to the agreement, and they are obligated to make the content available under the same streaming/download service terms. In other words, they have a liability to provide the streaming/download service forever. If they go bankrupt, then you could sue for recompense as a creditor. If they sell the rights to another company, then your streaming/download access goes along with it.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I would love to live in your universe but we're a long way away from distributing content like that. It would be nice if licensing any sort of copyrighted content came with a physical/digital transferable license that could be redeemed by the owner under with some reasonableness standard attached.
    - neuralRiot 8y ago
      How about a blockchain for DRM?
vonzeppelin 8y ago
I've noticed a lot of my older purchased music on Amazon Music is now unplayable without any notice to me. Usually the complete album is gone but sometimes it leaves me with just a few of the songs still playable from the album.
- autotune 8y ago
  Yeah I only bother purchasing songs I plan to play on guitar through Amazon for access to the direct mp3 file, everything else gets streamed through Spotify for casual listening. No point buying online access to albums or individual songs just for casual listening imho. Can buy band shirts/high quality vinyl records/other merch directly from most artists and see them in concert as better ways to support them.
- rc_bhg 8y ago
  Jeez. This is why I will never spend any real money on Amazon or Apple to purchase digital copies of movies. I want to be sure I'll still own those movies in 30 years.
- metildaa 8y ago
  Perhaps using a reputable service like Bandcamp would avoid this issue entirely. Amazon Music looks like a me too service, akin to MSN Music or MS's later attempts to sell music. Often, these giant tech companies will happily make it so you cant get your songs or play them on the devices you want to: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-sucks-redux-microsoft-to-nuke-msn-music-drm-keys/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-s...
- zaccus 8y ago
  At least with Amazon Music you can download DRM-free mp3s and back them up somewhere. Can't do that with Amazon Video, which is why I just rent those.
emptybits 8y ago
In a nutshell: > the “Buy” button in digital stores is, at best, mislabeled
chooseaname 8y ago
I thought you never owned a movie, you only had a license to view it. Even on BR, you only have a license to view it for as long as the physical disk is playable (or some such nonsense).
- shrimp_emoji 8y ago
  Do you want your movies DRM-free and in a convenient format? 5€/month for a decent VPN to torrent[0] behind is way cheaper than Netflix. :3 0: https://rarbg.to/torrents.php https://rarbg.to/torrents.php
  - turbo_fart_box 8y ago
    Http://real-debrid.com. Far better. Loads of plugins for Kodi apps and instant streaming
    - dmix 8y ago
      How exactly does that work? Does it provide premium access to multiple file hosting sites ala 4shared and FileFactory? Or is it just a way to download free from those sites easier? Edit: tested it out, that's pretty cool.
- Y-bar 8y ago
  A lawyer reading the terms and conditions will likely agree with you. But why then does the button ask me to “Buy this movie” rather than “License this movie” or “Buy this license”? The receipt also says I bought a movie. If we are not actually buying the movie the seller should not be able to use that word.
- int_19h 8y ago
  In this case, the use of the terms "buy", "purchase", "own" and "yours" in all marketing materials should be considered outright fraud, and fined accordingly. Deal?
lathiat 8y ago
It's not clearly stated in the original tweets, but I'm glad this article covered it. The Movie was not "physically" deleted from their library. They didn't have a downloaded copy of it, and the ability to re-download (or stream) a new copy from iTunes no longer exists. This is an understandable frustration since the workflows for iCloud, Apple Music, etc are pushing the cloud downloadability to be a first class feature and you would expect your purchases to stay there. That's sadly not always the case. But I think this is an important distinction
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  Is it possible to avoid local deletion if you need to reinstall the OS or move to a new computer? (I don't know how this works.)
  - DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
    The video files are DRM encrypted - I don’t know how long iTunes or macOS retains local decryption key caches (especially if it uses Apple’s TPM equivalent) but based on my experiences with the iOS App Store provided you retain the actual video file then Apple will still grant you a decryption key. iOS App Store apps that have been removed from the store can still be installed on a new iPhone if you still have the IPA file. (Unfortunately newer versions of iTunes don’t let you backup and restore IPA files anymore and even “iPhone backups” don’t include apps themselves anymore, only your app’s user data.)
    - xoa 8y ago
      >Unfortunately newer versions of iTunes don’t let you backup and restore IPA files anymore and even “iPhone backups” don’t include apps themselves anymore, only your app’s user data. This was a real bummer, and feels mostly borne (like many modern big tech company moves recently) not so much out of any sort of monetization strategy or whatever as a basic but irritating bubble: a bunch of tech workers who simply can't comprehend being on a "broadband" connection of the 5/1 ADSL sort (or worse) that much of the world, including America, is still stuck on. It's not a security or DRM issue, the old backup system still signed/encrypted everything and still required calls into the mothership and the like. It's mainly sucked just because it makes it enormously slower to restore a phone for people with poor connections. I wish Apple had seen a chance to differentiate themselves there with more local support (presumably which could be leverage into hardware product sales) since unlike Google they are not dependent on ad/cloud revenue, but perhaps it was inevitable as they lost track of all SoHo efforts with the Mac. As a startup org structure it's just hard for Apple to multi-task as well for better and for worse.
thefounder 8y ago
This is the result of DRM...you don't own anything. You are at the mearcy of a handful of companies.
- ommunist 8y ago
  Quite right. True ownership means you can sell what you own. Instead you only have a license to use, hence you are never owner, but only a user. “End-user license agreement is a holy binding contract”.
smitherfield 8y ago
Good customer service lesson here: Apple should've offered either a refund or to mail him the Blu-rays of the movies. I imagine this is a rare enough scenario they can easily afford for that to be their default response to such a support ticket, and the customer would most likely either tweet positively about the experience or not at all. (There still might be the odd unreasonable one who complains "I wanted to watch it now!" but that can't be avoided).
smsm42 8y ago
Isn't it kinda old news? I've heard stories about Apple removing digital content (and not only Apple of course) for years. In general, if you get DRMed digital content from somebody, they control your access, that's the whole point of the DRM! So no surprise whatsoever.
draw_down 8y ago
Pirated copies are still better than purchased ones. Not much else to say. Streaming services and stores can (and do) make stuff disappear; regular video files are just regular video files.
tunesmith 8y ago
The article frustratingly doesn't make clear what happens if you had downloaded the movie. If you download the movie, and it's removed from Apple's library, and you try to play it, are you able? Or does it say, "Sorry, you are not authorized"? This would make a big difference for me because I've downloaded every Apple purchase for years onto my Drobo. If Apple prevents playback in these cases, then I may as well delete them all and save terabytes of disk space.
faragon 8y ago
"All your library are belong to Apple" [1] [1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
polskibus 8y ago
Apple should warn users that have bought movies that are about to be removed from their offering, so they could download them before they disappear.
aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
Daily reminder that the “cloud” is just someone else’s computer.
afandian 8y ago
It's frustrating that the word 'purchase' is used for this kind of transaction. Like 'unlimited', it's use is fundamentally dishonest and vendors get away with it because everyone knows they lie. If I buy a paperback book or a drm free ebook, that's a purchase. If I pay for a drm movie or kindle book, that's a long-term rental.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  If I buy a game from Steam then contractually that is a rental, but it behaves like a purchase. I can install it anywhere I like, I can back it up to a physical disk, and most importantly I can redownload it in perpetuity; even if the same item is no longer for sale on Steam. The only risk in comparison to a physical copy is that Valve fundamentally changes or goes bankrupt. Both seem unlikely. This makes any purchase on Steam basically as safe as a physical purchase, resulting in Steam basically replacing physical game purchases on the PC.
  - afandian 8y ago
    I don't know anything about Valve. But if I cancel my Amazon account, I doubt that I would be able to keep all the books I bought.
  - androidgirl 8y ago
    As an aside, some games on Steam are DRM free and/or can be run without steam. Stardew Valley and Kerbal Space Program spring to mind. There is also GOG, which sells DRM-free games. I just keep backups of my games on my NAS.
    - plussed_reader 8y ago
      How often do you replace the NAS?
  - kipchak 8y ago
    A concern I've heard brought up is if games are no longer supported on a new version of Windows, but steam and steamworks DRM is no longer able to run on an old version of Windows that the game is compatible with. Sometimes games like this are removed from the Steam store, like World in Conflict, and can be made to work with some tweaking. But for a decent number of people that can be a problem, and there's no guarantee that will always be possible. To be fair this is dependent on the specific DRM type, if the game receives any kind of fan/official updates to solve the issue, and there's not exactly an easy way out for Valve. Plus games that have to phone in to a central server to work are going to be more of an issue anyway so by comparison Steamworks DRM is doing pretty well.
ommunist 8y ago
Yup. Try to find “Iron Sky” in Movies? Happened to be deleted. It contained harsh parody on American woman president, so...
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
Scrolling through the comments, the focus seems to be mostly on Apple, but this isn't about Apple. This is about the entertainment companies, copyright law, and the fact that these industries are so large and protected by regulatory capture that they can dictate to companies the size of APPLE how they should enforce their will on customers. The same caveats apply to Steam or Comcast or anyone else who is "selling" you something they can yank back away from you (And, for the purposes of my comment, I make no distinction between removing the ability to re-download, or reach into your hard drive and delete.)
- lostmyoldone 8y ago
  Isn't it rathwr unlikely they dictated anything to Apple, as Apple isn't, and wasn't exactly at the brink of bankruptcy. They could have chosen a different path. It is probably more likely, looking at the history of a couple of different online movie/music services, that Apple simply decided to play ball with the media companies to get better deals, and earn more money. Simultaneosly getting a foot in the door to stop the "rebel" companies entering the scene, crashing the media industries party, and Apples too. While Apple with their positioning obviously has a lot to win on being the #1 choice of the media giants, I believe they went there quite willingly.
bitL 8y ago
Can't wait getting some classics removed from my movie library automatically when the algorithmic Zeitgeist decides they violate some new sensitivity. Funny this was predicted in detail 10 years ago (how to build such a system starting with secure boot loader) and we just go full steam ahead. "Masters" now have a perfect tool to rewrite history; all contradicting documents can disappear from devices at will. Seems like mindless hedonistic consumption bruising quiet virtuous parts of population without loud voice will be the only thing allowed; everything else would be polarizing and suppressed.
- neuralRiot 8y ago
  Suppression of unwanted voices is not new, the only thing changing is the medium, there has been and always will, oppressors and rebels. There are tools to remove DRM and ways to jailbreak your device.
- SSLy 8y ago
  >this was predicted in detail 10 years ago Over 20, the story is from 1997.
  - rebolek 8y ago
    What story? 1984 was written in 1948.
    - SSLy 8y ago
      Right to read.
  - BrandonMarc 8y ago
    Which story? I mean, Orwell's 1984 comes to mind frankly, but that's from the mid 20th century, not 10 or 20 years ago.
    - adrianratnapala 8y ago
      And then there was the incident from the early days of the Kindle, when peoples copies of 1984 got disappeared when someone made a copyright claim on it.
makecheck 8y ago
It’s not just deletion; items are replaced based on “someone’s” judgment that the new item is equivalent. The later version is sometimes obviously different and often worse. For instance, a “remastered” version can change content. A song might be completely rerecorded and sound different than the version I bought/liked. If Star Wars teaches us anything, you can’t just rerelease something and assume it’s an improvement.
tim333 8y ago
On the one hand they can delete stuff which is kind of bad. On the other you can just download it from bittorrent which sort of gets around the issue.
huhtenberg 8y ago
It's the same bullshit with AppStore purchases! I was absolutely pissed when trying to re-install a rather expensive game (The Secret of Monkey Island) only to discover that I can't, because Disney yanked it from the AppStore after purchasing LucasArts. I paid for the damn thing, I used it then and I need it now. Talking to Apple is like talking to a f#cking wall. Absolutely pointless. Apparently I should've been making versioned backups of my iThing in order to preserve the binary. That was their actual reply. Ain't it something? Caveat emptor, basically.
ishikawa 8y ago
The same is valid for my iPad 1. Several apps I bought for it I no longer can download again if I need, because of new OS versions or because they are no longer in the store. And believe me: my iPad 1 still works great and I have several educational apps that my toddler is now enjoying the same way his older brother did 6 years ago.
ChickeNES 8y ago
Does anyone know which movies were removed? I wonder if they have something in common.
Joeri 8y ago
I had the same thing happen with a music album. The publisher retracted the album and then republished it. I lost access to the old version but did not gain access to the new version. Apple refused to help out. They said I should resort to my file backups. Luckily I kept those file backups so I can still play that album, but it can happen to any content purchased through itunes (or amazon, or ...). You're not buying it, you're renting in perpetuity.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
It gets weirder, our public library was asked to destroy their copy of "Eyes on the Prize", which they had either bought or been donated (it was a commercial product at the time), by the Martin Luther King family because of a dispute over rights. That dispute was settled (with the injection of money apparently) and it became available again but the library has not (the last time I checked) re-acquired it for their collection. This story that Apple does this too reminds of how insane IP law can be. Next up, when you travel to a different region (based on GPS) your iDevice stops being able to play media you've got on the local flash drive.
moskie 8y ago
A practical reality that dawned on me one day has changed my perspective on this situation a bit: it's the fact that I no longer have my VHS or cassette tapes. I got rid of them at some point. So the idea that purchases of physical media result in me having a thing forever, while digital purchases are inherently temporary at the behest of companies like Apple, Google, or Amazon, doesn't really hold up to what I (and many others) actually experience. Because my physical purchases are also, eventually, temporary. Will these companies do something, or go bankrupt, such that one day I no longer have access to my "purchases?" Maybe? Probably? Who knows. And if they do, I hope laws or class action lawsuits step in to mitigate the issue... But it ultimately feels a bit Chicken-Little-ish to me to suggest this is some kind of disaster. We've all re-bought our favorite books/movies/shows/music in various formats as time goes on. Our digital purchases will be no different.
qiqing 8y ago
This part jumped out at me: > Apple wrote back to him that “the content provider has removed these movies from the Canadian Store. Hence, these movies are not available in the Canada iTunes Store at this time.” So, if the person in the article used a VPN to pretend to be in the U.S., would he have been able to redownload his movies? Or is the account itself tethered to the Canada iTunes Store? I'm not sure how the country attribution for iTunes accounts works.
botskonet 8y ago
Does anyone notify you of upcoming removals? We've maybe purchased hundreds of movies over the years and we'd never know something was removed.
Chazprime 8y ago
Apple really needs to implement a means to notify users that content is “rolling off” their service and give those who have purchased it a means to download it before the end date.
- GeekyBear 8y ago
  Going forward, they need to specify in their contracts with content providers that losing the right to sell new copies of a given work does not mean that customers who have already purchased that work can no longer stream and/or download it.
dijit 8y ago
I spoke about this phenominon before. If they remove it from the store; they remove your entitlement. https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups
aethertron 8y ago
It's not 'your library' if it's on someone else's computer.
mihaela 8y ago
That is Holywood for you. That is why torrents exist.
mindslight 8y ago
I've never recall Oink or What.CD doing this, even when they shut down. Just sayin'.
superice 8y ago
What I mostly do not understand is that Apple did not structure this as a 'we will store your library for you' instead of a 'you can redownload from the store anytime'. The first case would mean that rights holders cannot force Apple to not redistribute that data anymore, because either it would be transparent to Apple, or at the very least the ownership for that copy of the data would lie with the customer, not with the rights holder. (And ofcourse it could be a nice implementation detail that Apple deduplicates multiple copies on their servers). The only conclusion to be drawn is that Apple does not care for the best interests of their customers, and probably gave in to the demands of rights holders, which is concerning.
hawkice 8y ago
I'm most frustrated by a particular song I purchased in iTunes maybe 15 years ago, which is not just gone from my iTunes library but disappeared from almost all existence. Real art is being lost here.
Bud 8y ago
This article is intentionally misleading, in that it does not even refer to the fact that this user could have avoided losing these files in several different ways, including simply by making a backup. This is about losing the ability to re-download and nothing else.
jboy55 8y ago
How much of this is Apple's fault and how much of it is the RIAA and MPAA's fault for enforcing this region based DRM structure where every possible use of media is split up and locked from each other. Oh, I was only able to purchase the rights to allow my users to download this movie in the USA until 01/20, English Canada until 6/19, Quebec until 1/19, UK until 1/22. Then, if the movie is still popular, the renewal rights for this movie will be bundled with 100s of other movies my users hate, all with different time periods and locations. If it isn't popular, it gets thrown into a bundle that will be forced upon content providers so net out a few extra $ on movies no one wants to see.
lgregg 8y ago
I wonder if there is anywhere on the internet where you can buy and download movie files. Of course, you can torrent them but that's illegal.
dj43nq 8y ago
I tend to think of these electronic “Purchase” transactions as a purchase of a temporary license. This mindset means the price should be significantly cheaper. You never really own these digital assets. A good test is trying to gift/sell something in your library to someone else.
matheusmoreira 8y ago
I think it is hilarious how copyright actively prevents content distribution companies from properly competing with piracy.
iamleppert 8y ago
The same thing happens if you owe them any money, however small. Right now I owe Apple $0.99 because I’m waiting on a new card to come and one of my recent previous purchases failed. Their response is to hold my entire library of “purchased” music and movies hostage until they get their $0.99. I can’t play or access anything. Clearly, I own nothing in their eyes. This is the same as if Blockbuster would hold all your DVDs hostage you bought from them if you owed them any money. If you don’t own the unrestricted physical medium, you own nothing. I guess there’s a reason Apple is dominant: aggression and brutality always win out in humanity. We are all just passive & submissive subordinates, Apple is our one true master and dark lord.
- dymk 8y ago
  > "... aggression and brutality always win out in humanity. We are all just passive & submissive subordinates, Apple is our one true master and dark lord" Have we reached peak melodrama on HN?
  - sitepodmatt 8y ago
    To complete, add one oversensitive white male who feels offended by the word 'master' because slaves had masters.
- lloeki 8y ago
  > I guess there’s a reason Apple is dominant: aggression and brutality always win out in humanity How does that follow? Google, Facebook, Microsoft... are all equally heavy handed so I don't see how that makes Apple any more "dominant" than the other players in the field.
tzury 8y ago
Long before Apple Music subscription was available, I purchased dozens of albums and songs from iTunes. As the service become available, I joined it for about a year or so. One day I decided to cancel my Apple Music monthly subscription. As I did so, all the albums and songs I purchased prior to the Apple Music subscription simply vanished. That is to say, not only Obie’s, rather anything.
yason 8y ago
That's the reason I've never subscribed to any of the itunes, spotifys, or whatever services there are for music and video. I always went "Oh, I'll join a bit later when these services can be trusted as much as my local copies" and that never happened. In my opinion these "purchases" aren't really even "renting". Even renting has terms more solid than "Oh, we just had to take it away from you, sorry". Making things you've collected vanish would be extremely bad customer experience even in a free service, not to mention one that you actually pay for.
on_and_off 8y ago
This is why I use Play Music : I can upload my own tracks and download my library if need be. For games I largely favor GOG : all the games are playable even without their launcher (even though I use it) and you can back them up. For movies/series, is there such a solution ? apart from torrenting of course.
- flukus 8y ago
  > This is why I use Play Music : I can upload my own tracks and download my library if need be. This was to get easy adoption from people with existing music collections, don't be surprised when they cut this feature in future. With people growing up with spotify and the like I doubt it's even that important for new users anymore.
  - on_and_off 8y ago
    if/when they cut it I will just download my library and bring it somewhere else, that's the whole point.
eric24234 8y ago
RMS is right. Long live RMS. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
spiorf 8y ago
Haha, "your" library...
fghtr 8y ago
Just in time before the International Day Against DRM. Act against it! https://www.defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm https://www.defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm

515 points by Y-bar 8y ago

seymour333 8y ago

Just wait until Amazon changes the content of your books without telling you

icebraining 8y ago
You mean the Automatic Book Updates feature on the Kindle?
- seymour333 8y ago
  No, I mean a super crazy conspiracy theory where Amazon changes the content of books to better fit some acquired set of political or ideological views
  - masklinn 8y ago
    So… exactly what Amazon's automatic book update can do, just hasn't yet?
  - buckminster 8y ago
    This is far more likely to happen in settlement of a libel suit, say. It doesn't require any conspiracy.
satysin 8y ago
Like when Amazon removed Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindle devices silently? https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
- seymour333 8y ago
  Yeah that, only instead of removing it, they just spend a few decades turning it into an endorsement
  - dwighttk 8y ago
    Yeah like the Bearenstein bears, amirite?
    - seymour333 8y ago
      They must have spent _years_ printing and aging copies of those books and destroying the originals. You have to admire the dedication
      - rc_bhg 8y ago
        Wait, what is this? What happened?
        amyjess 8y ago
        It's a joke. The books are called The Berenstain Bears. Because surnames ending in -stain are extremely rare and surnames ending in -stein are fairly common, a lot of people misremember them as The Berenstein Bears. This has spawned numerous conspiracy theories about the name changing. There is a group of people who seriously believe they've somehow travelled into a parallel universe where the only difference is that a children's book series is named differently. This theory is often referred to as "the Mandela Effect", which is named after how a lot of people mistakenly remember hearing about Nelson Mandela dying years before he actually did (and yes, these people claim that they've accidentally travelled to a parallel universe where the only difference is that Nelson Mandela lived another 15 years). The theory sounds like a joke, but its proponents take it dead seriously, and they've been known to start flamewars over it. As such, a lot of people like to make fun of these conspiracy theories by concocting the most ludicrous theories we can think of.
bambax 8y ago
Calibre (unsupported) plugins let you remove DRM from Kindle books, so you actually can save a local copy not connected to Amazon in any way. I keep buying Kindle books while this is still possible, and will stop if it ceases to be.
- seymour333 8y ago
  Is there currently a single source of truth for the content of books and other written media? Something like a hash of all the contents that can be stored in some indelible way (blockchain maybe?) so that as time passes people can verify that the content has remained the same?
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    Nope, but I imagine you could create one using something like the IPFS protocol: https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/
- realusername 8y ago
  be careful with sharing books you got with this method. The Calibre plugin does remove the DRM but not the Amazon User ID they embed inside. Keeping it for you is fine, otherwise you need to be more cautious.
  - bambax 8y ago
    I don't share books, I just store them in epub format so that I can read them in Marvin. But thanks for the heads up. Do you know if the Kindle user Id is saved in the epub file when converted with Calibre?

ceejayoz 8y ago

Headline is a bit misleading. From my reading, this isn't Apple reaching into your local library to delete them - if they'd kept the originals they'd still be there. They're just not available for re-download, which is similar to losing a DVD - the store isn't gonna give you another one for free.

headhuntermdk 8y ago
Not quite.. it also means that you can't stream it from your library either. So effectively it is the same. This is a cautionary tale for those who are buying iTunes 4k movies and can't stream 4k from a local device on their network https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/21/itunes-4k-content-streaming-only/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/21/itunes-4k-content-strea...
sramam 8y ago
I think a more analogous sequence would be: * The store offered to keep a DVD in safe-custody while you moved addresses. * You accepted the deal and shipped them the DVD. * You arrive at the new address, and the store refuses to deliver the DVD. Hence the rankle. [edit] bulleting
stordoff 8y ago
Not quite the same, as the implication is that you can stream indefinitely. You _can't_ download 4K videos, for instance.

rajat 8y ago

It does seem obvious that short of having your own copy of something purchased (in this case, a movie), this will happen. Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. I wonder if it's even legal for Apple to maintain a copy of the movie in iTunes for customers who've already purchased it once they have lost the right to host it. Clearly, most of us don't appreciate the difference between what it meant to purchase something, and what it means today in the digital, subscription world. So, if you really want to own a movie or a song, buy a physical incarnation of it, or make a digital copy of it.

saidajigumi 8y ago
I wonder if it's even legal for Apple to maintain a copy of the movie in iTunes for customers who've already purchased it once they have lost the right to host it. Actually, I'd put this on Apple legal: the contracts should specify that customer purchases can continue be hosted, and served to those customers in perpetuity. It's possible that Apple didn't have the leverage or foresight to negotiate these terms, but the "fix" here is straightforward because it's an issue of contractual terms, not some notion of "legality".
- thedaemon 8y ago
  I have purchased many movies on Google Play that are no longer available for purchase. They are still available for me to watch.
derefr 8y ago
> Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. I'm pretty sure you could design a SaaS offering in two parts: one that sells you a digital copy of a thing as a product (rather than a license), for delivery to a digital storage locker; and then, the other, a digital storage locker. Oddly enough, Apple already has a digital storage locker, called iCloud Music Library. It's where your uploaded songs go when you use iTunes Match and the song doesn't actually match any entry in the Apple Music library. If iCloud Music Library were properly designed (it's not), your purchased, matched, and uploaded songs would all be available permanently through iCloud Music Library in its capacity as a digital storage locker, whether or not they're still available through Apple Music. The licence-holders wouldn't be able to do anything about this: this isn't Apple broadcasting a song, this is Apple acting as the moral equivalent of bank, offering a safe-deposit box service, where you hold a box into which you've put a USB stick containing the song you bought from them. Sadly, the synergy between Apple Music and iCloud Music Library is actually exactly the opposite of what anyone would want: when an artist's license agreement with Apple Music expires and their tracks are purged from the system, Apple will actually delete not just your purchased licenses from your iCloud Music Library; and not just the licenses of Apple Music tracks that fingerprint-matched local copies you had; but even your uploaded (!) copies of songs by a given artist that didn't match any Apple Music license, but just happened to have ID3 information corresponding to the artist whose rights were expiring. (In that case, the tracks still appear as entries in the iCloud Music Library list, but they're under a permanent "waiting" status, because their backing storage has been removed. There are many support threads about this issue, none with answers—well, that's what's going on.)

Macha 8y ago

This is why I strip the DRM and backup anything I purchase locally, and don't use services that don't have any method to acquire a raw copy (like the google play store). It's a strong selling point if it's provided by the vendor (e.g. GOG for video games), but sadly hollywood is an industry that hates the concept.

gruez 8y ago
>and don't use services that don't have any method to acquire a raw copy (like the google play store) are you sure you're not confusing that with the app store? it's trivial to get the .apk from a bought app after it's on your phone, but it's not trivial to strip the playfair DRM off an .ipa.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure the reference is to video content from the Google Play Store, not apps or (even easier to get raw content) audio content from the same store.
  - Macha 8y ago
    Yes, I was talking about the movies on the play store.
- Splines 8y ago
  > it's trivial to get the .apk from a bought app after it's on your phone I'd argue that while it might be easy today, that's just an implementation detail. The play store does not advertise anywhere that you can backup APKs for installation later in case an app is pulled from the store. Tomorrow Google could invent a new kind of delivery mechanism that makes this stop working.
rbritton 8y ago
I purchase a decent amount of digital-only content, and I always strip the DRM off of it. It's relatively easy to do this with content purchased in iTunes.

mbostleman 8y ago

My landlord can put a lock for which I don't have a key on my apartment door without telling me too. The question is not whether he can or can't lock my door. The question is whether or not the terms of our agreement allow him to block my access or not. The fact that people often don't understand the terms of there agreements is definitely a problem, but that's not what the headline implies unfortunately.

jstanley 8y ago
But with computers it needn't be that way. Computers allow us the power to be the ultimate masters of our own data. There's no reason to relinquish that power.
- mbostleman 8y ago
  Presumably you mean with computers you own. The use case in this article involves the data on computers owned by Apple.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
Once upon a time that agreement would've been "whenever the owner feels like it". Fortunately laws were passed for tenant rights. We've yet to do the same with abusive contracts of adhesion where you relinquish basic rights to lease a movie until the provider feels like removing it and provide you zero recourse.
- mbostleman 8y ago
  I have a hard time applying terms like "abusive" to a situation that I entered in to voluntarily and to which all the terms were available to me prior to entering. Unless you mean that I am abusing myself, which is probably accurate.
  - orcdork 8y ago
    So any contract is fair and there is absolutely no chance of coercion or intimidation by a party with an unfair negotiating advantage?

tyingq 8y ago

Frontier did this to me after they took over FIOS from Verizon. No recourse either...I tried several times to fight them. Ended up just dropping them and losing my purchased movies.

JohnTHaller 8y ago

If, say, you'd purchased and downloaded the movie on your iPhone 7 and then the movie was removed from Apple's store, could you then copy the movie to your iPhone 8 when you upgraded? If not, then this is about as far from "owning" a movie as you can get. Remember, if there's cloud-based licensing involved, you're not "buying" anything, you're just leasing.

asimpletune 8y ago
Yeah, you could
robteix 8y ago
I don't know about movies, but you can definitely lose apps. I used to own a game called X-Plane that I played on my iPad. Then the authors created a new "version" (as a new paid app.) At some point, I reset my iPad and set it up as a new device and there was no way to download the app anymore as it had been removed from the app store. It is still hosted there somewhere, so if you have the backup, it will download the app from the app store, but it is not "findable" so if you have a new device, so sorry.
- larrik 8y ago
  It should appear in your "Purchased" list in that case.
djrogers 8y ago
Yes, as long as you have a digital copy of the movie you can move/copy it to any device tied to your account. The problem here is he did't have a downloaded copy of the movie.

debt 8y ago

Please feel free to enjoy this copyrighted experience. You may purchase or rent or use whichever verbs you deem appropriate to procure this experience, either way, we as the mere provider of such copyrighted experience may have to revoke your access to such experience for reasons both within and without our control. Your purchase may or may not grant you at least a single viewing of the copyrighted experience. Regardless if you have or have not purchased, you may not store or download or copy or backup any portion of the copyrighted experience. Enjoy!

msla 8y ago
> copywritten As distinct from copyrighted, then? As usual, people have no sense of humor.
- zem 8y ago
  the internet is for ads
  - msla 8y ago
    > the internet is for ads ... did you reply to the wrong comment, zem?
    - zem 8y ago
      no, it was a pun on "copywritten"
anticensor 8y ago
A new verb would fit: cobuy

jakebasile 8y ago

Steam handles this much better. If a game is removed from sale for some reason people who already purchased it still have access. For example, I still have access to the original Prey even though it's no longer available.

jstarfish 8y ago
ESID. All customers of GTA4 had the soundtrack gutted retroactively in April.
fastball 8y ago
Sometimes you actually get an improvement. I purchased the original version Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the Steam store. A year or so later, they released the "Director's Cut" of DE:HR. Steam automatically "upgraded" my copy, so now I have the Director's Cut version in my Steam library.
- discreditable 8y ago
  Same here with Red Faction: Guerrilla, and the Re-mars-tered edition.
- int_19h 8y ago
  Or sometimes it's a downgrade, like with Skyrim SE.

sidstling 8y ago

I view any digital distribution platform where your content is tied to the platform itself as renting rather than buying. Makes things much simpler. That's why it was so disheartening to buy the x-com remake and find nothing but a steam activation code inside the box. I don't feel like I own that game because it's tied to an online account. I know that you can just keep a local copy of it, but it's still tied to the platform and if you wanted to go to a different platform, you couldn't take it with you.

bunderbunder 8y ago
With iOS it's even worse, because you end up tied to a specific version of the platform. For example: I bought the Monkey Island remake for iOS when it came out. It's no longer playable, because a 64-bit binary was never produced, and 32-bit apps don't work on iOS 11. Similar things happened with computer operating systems, but holding on to an older version is so much easier to do on computers. I guess a 7 year usable life is decent for how much I paid for the game, but still, annoying.

adrian_mrd 8y ago

And Apple can also add non-purchased music albums into your library without telling you too - refer to that debacle involving the U2 album 'Songs of Innocence' from 2014.

robbiemitchell 8y ago

Apple should not be "selling" content for which they do not have a perpetual license to resell. Full stop.

tantalor 8y ago
It doesn't really matter if Apple loses the license to distribute it, since you as the purchaser (should) have an irrevocable perpetual license to streaming/download the content. The distributor, who made the content originally available to Apple, is a party to the agreement, and they are obligated to make the content available under the same streaming/download service terms. In other words, they have a liability to provide the streaming/download service forever. If they go bankrupt, then you could sue for recompense as a creditor. If they sell the rights to another company, then your streaming/download access goes along with it.
- Spivak 8y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I would love to live in your universe but we're a long way away from distributing content like that. It would be nice if licensing any sort of copyrighted content came with a physical/digital transferable license that could be redeemed by the owner under with some reasonableness standard attached.
  - neuralRiot 8y ago
    How about a blockchain for DRM?

vonzeppelin 8y ago

I've noticed a lot of my older purchased music on Amazon Music is now unplayable without any notice to me. Usually the complete album is gone but sometimes it leaves me with just a few of the songs still playable from the album.

autotune 8y ago
Yeah I only bother purchasing songs I plan to play on guitar through Amazon for access to the direct mp3 file, everything else gets streamed through Spotify for casual listening. No point buying online access to albums or individual songs just for casual listening imho. Can buy band shirts/high quality vinyl records/other merch directly from most artists and see them in concert as better ways to support them.
rc_bhg 8y ago
Jeez. This is why I will never spend any real money on Amazon or Apple to purchase digital copies of movies. I want to be sure I'll still own those movies in 30 years.
metildaa 8y ago
Perhaps using a reputable service like Bandcamp would avoid this issue entirely. Amazon Music looks like a me too service, akin to MSN Music or MS's later attempts to sell music. Often, these giant tech companies will happily make it so you cant get your songs or play them on the devices you want to: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-sucks-redux-microsoft-to-nuke-msn-music-drm-keys/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-s...
zaccus 8y ago
At least with Amazon Music you can download DRM-free mp3s and back them up somewhere. Can't do that with Amazon Video, which is why I just rent those.

emptybits 8y ago

In a nutshell: > the “Buy” button in digital stores is, at best, mislabeled

chooseaname 8y ago

I thought you never owned a movie, you only had a license to view it. Even on BR, you only have a license to view it for as long as the physical disk is playable (or some such nonsense).

shrimp_emoji 8y ago
Do you want your movies DRM-free and in a convenient format? 5€/month for a decent VPN to torrent[0] behind is way cheaper than Netflix. :3 0: https://rarbg.to/torrents.php https://rarbg.to/torrents.php
- turbo_fart_box 8y ago
  Http://real-debrid.com. Far better. Loads of plugins for Kodi apps and instant streaming
  - dmix 8y ago
    How exactly does that work? Does it provide premium access to multiple file hosting sites ala 4shared and FileFactory? Or is it just a way to download free from those sites easier? Edit: tested it out, that's pretty cool.
Y-bar 8y ago
A lawyer reading the terms and conditions will likely agree with you. But why then does the button ask me to “Buy this movie” rather than “License this movie” or “Buy this license”? The receipt also says I bought a movie. If we are not actually buying the movie the seller should not be able to use that word.
int_19h 8y ago
In this case, the use of the terms "buy", "purchase", "own" and "yours" in all marketing materials should be considered outright fraud, and fined accordingly. Deal?

lathiat 8y ago

It's not clearly stated in the original tweets, but I'm glad this article covered it. The Movie was not "physically" deleted from their library. They didn't have a downloaded copy of it, and the ability to re-download (or stream) a new copy from iTunes no longer exists. This is an understandable frustration since the workflows for iCloud, Apple Music, etc are pushing the cloud downloadability to be a first class feature and you would expect your purchases to stay there. That's sadly not always the case. But I think this is an important distinction

mehrdadn 8y ago
Is it possible to avoid local deletion if you need to reinstall the OS or move to a new computer? (I don't know how this works.)
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  The video files are DRM encrypted - I don’t know how long iTunes or macOS retains local decryption key caches (especially if it uses Apple’s TPM equivalent) but based on my experiences with the iOS App Store provided you retain the actual video file then Apple will still grant you a decryption key. iOS App Store apps that have been removed from the store can still be installed on a new iPhone if you still have the IPA file. (Unfortunately newer versions of iTunes don’t let you backup and restore IPA files anymore and even “iPhone backups” don’t include apps themselves anymore, only your app’s user data.)
  - xoa 8y ago
    >Unfortunately newer versions of iTunes don’t let you backup and restore IPA files anymore and even “iPhone backups” don’t include apps themselves anymore, only your app’s user data. This was a real bummer, and feels mostly borne (like many modern big tech company moves recently) not so much out of any sort of monetization strategy or whatever as a basic but irritating bubble: a bunch of tech workers who simply can't comprehend being on a "broadband" connection of the 5/1 ADSL sort (or worse) that much of the world, including America, is still stuck on. It's not a security or DRM issue, the old backup system still signed/encrypted everything and still required calls into the mothership and the like. It's mainly sucked just because it makes it enormously slower to restore a phone for people with poor connections. I wish Apple had seen a chance to differentiate themselves there with more local support (presumably which could be leverage into hardware product sales) since unlike Google they are not dependent on ad/cloud revenue, but perhaps it was inevitable as they lost track of all SoHo efforts with the Mac. As a startup org structure it's just hard for Apple to multi-task as well for better and for worse.

thefounder 8y ago

This is the result of DRM...you don't own anything. You are at the mearcy of a handful of companies.

ommunist 8y ago
Quite right. True ownership means you can sell what you own. Instead you only have a license to use, hence you are never owner, but only a user. “End-user license agreement is a holy binding contract”.

smitherfield 8y ago

Good customer service lesson here: Apple should've offered either a refund or to mail him the Blu-rays of the movies. I imagine this is a rare enough scenario they can easily afford for that to be their default response to such a support ticket, and the customer would most likely either tweet positively about the experience or not at all. (There still might be the odd unreasonable one who complains "I wanted to watch it now!" but that can't be avoided).

smsm42 8y ago

Isn't it kinda old news? I've heard stories about Apple removing digital content (and not only Apple of course) for years. In general, if you get DRMed digital content from somebody, they control your access, that's the whole point of the DRM! So no surprise whatsoever.

draw_down 8y ago

Pirated copies are still better than purchased ones. Not much else to say. Streaming services and stores can (and do) make stuff disappear; regular video files are just regular video files.

tunesmith 8y ago

The article frustratingly doesn't make clear what happens if you had downloaded the movie. If you download the movie, and it's removed from Apple's library, and you try to play it, are you able? Or does it say, "Sorry, you are not authorized"? This would make a big difference for me because I've downloaded every Apple purchase for years onto my Drobo. If Apple prevents playback in these cases, then I may as well delete them all and save terabytes of disk space.

faragon 8y ago

"All your library are belong to Apple" [1] [1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us

polskibus 8y ago

Apple should warn users that have bought movies that are about to be removed from their offering, so they could download them before they disappear.

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

Daily reminder that the “cloud” is just someone else’s computer.

afandian 8y ago

It's frustrating that the word 'purchase' is used for this kind of transaction. Like 'unlimited', it's use is fundamentally dishonest and vendors get away with it because everyone knows they lie. If I buy a paperback book or a drm free ebook, that's a purchase. If I pay for a drm movie or kindle book, that's a long-term rental.

wongarsu 8y ago
If I buy a game from Steam then contractually that is a rental, but it behaves like a purchase. I can install it anywhere I like, I can back it up to a physical disk, and most importantly I can redownload it in perpetuity; even if the same item is no longer for sale on Steam. The only risk in comparison to a physical copy is that Valve fundamentally changes or goes bankrupt. Both seem unlikely. This makes any purchase on Steam basically as safe as a physical purchase, resulting in Steam basically replacing physical game purchases on the PC.
- afandian 8y ago
  I don't know anything about Valve. But if I cancel my Amazon account, I doubt that I would be able to keep all the books I bought.
- androidgirl 8y ago
  As an aside, some games on Steam are DRM free and/or can be run without steam. Stardew Valley and Kerbal Space Program spring to mind. There is also GOG, which sells DRM-free games. I just keep backups of my games on my NAS.
  - plussed_reader 8y ago
    How often do you replace the NAS?
- kipchak 8y ago
  A concern I've heard brought up is if games are no longer supported on a new version of Windows, but steam and steamworks DRM is no longer able to run on an old version of Windows that the game is compatible with. Sometimes games like this are removed from the Steam store, like World in Conflict, and can be made to work with some tweaking. But for a decent number of people that can be a problem, and there's no guarantee that will always be possible. To be fair this is dependent on the specific DRM type, if the game receives any kind of fan/official updates to solve the issue, and there's not exactly an easy way out for Valve. Plus games that have to phone in to a central server to work are going to be more of an issue anyway so by comparison Steamworks DRM is doing pretty well.

ommunist 8y ago

Yup. Try to find “Iron Sky” in Movies? Happened to be deleted. It contained harsh parody on American woman president, so...

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago

Scrolling through the comments, the focus seems to be mostly on Apple, but this isn't about Apple. This is about the entertainment companies, copyright law, and the fact that these industries are so large and protected by regulatory capture that they can dictate to companies the size of APPLE how they should enforce their will on customers. The same caveats apply to Steam or Comcast or anyone else who is "selling" you something they can yank back away from you (And, for the purposes of my comment, I make no distinction between removing the ability to re-download, or reach into your hard drive and delete.)

lostmyoldone 8y ago
Isn't it rathwr unlikely they dictated anything to Apple, as Apple isn't, and wasn't exactly at the brink of bankruptcy. They could have chosen a different path. It is probably more likely, looking at the history of a couple of different online movie/music services, that Apple simply decided to play ball with the media companies to get better deals, and earn more money. Simultaneosly getting a foot in the door to stop the "rebel" companies entering the scene, crashing the media industries party, and Apples too. While Apple with their positioning obviously has a lot to win on being the #1 choice of the media giants, I believe they went there quite willingly.

bitL 8y ago

Can't wait getting some classics removed from my movie library automatically when the algorithmic Zeitgeist decides they violate some new sensitivity. Funny this was predicted in detail 10 years ago (how to build such a system starting with secure boot loader) and we just go full steam ahead. "Masters" now have a perfect tool to rewrite history; all contradicting documents can disappear from devices at will. Seems like mindless hedonistic consumption bruising quiet virtuous parts of population without loud voice will be the only thing allowed; everything else would be polarizing and suppressed.

neuralRiot 8y ago
Suppression of unwanted voices is not new, the only thing changing is the medium, there has been and always will, oppressors and rebels. There are tools to remove DRM and ways to jailbreak your device.
SSLy 8y ago
>this was predicted in detail 10 years ago Over 20, the story is from 1997.
- rebolek 8y ago
  What story? 1984 was written in 1948.
  - SSLy 8y ago
    Right to read.
- BrandonMarc 8y ago
  Which story? I mean, Orwell's 1984 comes to mind frankly, but that's from the mid 20th century, not 10 or 20 years ago.
  - adrianratnapala 8y ago
    And then there was the incident from the early days of the Kindle, when peoples copies of 1984 got disappeared when someone made a copyright claim on it.

makecheck 8y ago

It’s not just deletion; items are replaced based on “someone’s” judgment that the new item is equivalent. The later version is sometimes obviously different and often worse. For instance, a “remastered” version can change content. A song might be completely rerecorded and sound different than the version I bought/liked. If Star Wars teaches us anything, you can’t just rerelease something and assume it’s an improvement.

tim333 8y ago

On the one hand they can delete stuff which is kind of bad. On the other you can just download it from bittorrent which sort of gets around the issue.

huhtenberg 8y ago

It's the same bullshit with AppStore purchases! I was absolutely pissed when trying to re-install a rather expensive game (The Secret of Monkey Island) only to discover that I can't, because Disney yanked it from the AppStore after purchasing LucasArts. I paid for the damn thing, I used it then and I need it now. Talking to Apple is like talking to a f#cking wall. Absolutely pointless. Apparently I should've been making versioned backups of my iThing in order to preserve the binary. That was their actual reply. Ain't it something? Caveat emptor, basically.

ishikawa 8y ago

The same is valid for my iPad 1. Several apps I bought for it I no longer can download again if I need, because of new OS versions or because they are no longer in the store. And believe me: my iPad 1 still works great and I have several educational apps that my toddler is now enjoying the same way his older brother did 6 years ago.

ChickeNES 8y ago

Does anyone know which movies were removed? I wonder if they have something in common.

Joeri 8y ago

I had the same thing happen with a music album. The publisher retracted the album and then republished it. I lost access to the old version but did not gain access to the new version. Apple refused to help out. They said I should resort to my file backups. Luckily I kept those file backups so I can still play that album, but it can happen to any content purchased through itunes (or amazon, or ...). You're not buying it, you're renting in perpetuity.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

It gets weirder, our public library was asked to destroy their copy of "Eyes on the Prize", which they had either bought or been donated (it was a commercial product at the time), by the Martin Luther King family because of a dispute over rights. That dispute was settled (with the injection of money apparently) and it became available again but the library has not (the last time I checked) re-acquired it for their collection. This story that Apple does this too reminds of how insane IP law can be. Next up, when you travel to a different region (based on GPS) your iDevice stops being able to play media you've got on the local flash drive.

moskie 8y ago

A practical reality that dawned on me one day has changed my perspective on this situation a bit: it's the fact that I no longer have my VHS or cassette tapes. I got rid of them at some point. So the idea that purchases of physical media result in me having a thing forever, while digital purchases are inherently temporary at the behest of companies like Apple, Google, or Amazon, doesn't really hold up to what I (and many others) actually experience. Because my physical purchases are also, eventually, temporary. Will these companies do something, or go bankrupt, such that one day I no longer have access to my "purchases?" Maybe? Probably? Who knows. And if they do, I hope laws or class action lawsuits step in to mitigate the issue... But it ultimately feels a bit Chicken-Little-ish to me to suggest this is some kind of disaster. We've all re-bought our favorite books/movies/shows/music in various formats as time goes on. Our digital purchases will be no different.

qiqing 8y ago

This part jumped out at me: > Apple wrote back to him that “the content provider has removed these movies from the Canadian Store. Hence, these movies are not available in the Canada iTunes Store at this time.” So, if the person in the article used a VPN to pretend to be in the U.S., would he have been able to redownload his movies? Or is the account itself tethered to the Canada iTunes Store? I'm not sure how the country attribution for iTunes accounts works.

botskonet 8y ago

Does anyone notify you of upcoming removals? We've maybe purchased hundreds of movies over the years and we'd never know something was removed.

Chazprime 8y ago

Apple really needs to implement a means to notify users that content is “rolling off” their service and give those who have purchased it a means to download it before the end date.

GeekyBear 8y ago
Going forward, they need to specify in their contracts with content providers that losing the right to sell new copies of a given work does not mean that customers who have already purchased that work can no longer stream and/or download it.

dijit 8y ago

I spoke about this phenominon before. If they remove it from the store; they remove your entitlement. https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups

aethertron 8y ago

It's not 'your library' if it's on someone else's computer.

mihaela 8y ago

That is Holywood for you. That is why torrents exist.

mindslight 8y ago

I've never recall Oink or What.CD doing this, even when they shut down. Just sayin'.

superice 8y ago

What I mostly do not understand is that Apple did not structure this as a 'we will store your library for you' instead of a 'you can redownload from the store anytime'. The first case would mean that rights holders cannot force Apple to not redistribute that data anymore, because either it would be transparent to Apple, or at the very least the ownership for that copy of the data would lie with the customer, not with the rights holder. (And ofcourse it could be a nice implementation detail that Apple deduplicates multiple copies on their servers). The only conclusion to be drawn is that Apple does not care for the best interests of their customers, and probably gave in to the demands of rights holders, which is concerning.

hawkice 8y ago

I'm most frustrated by a particular song I purchased in iTunes maybe 15 years ago, which is not just gone from my iTunes library but disappeared from almost all existence. Real art is being lost here.

Bud 8y ago

This article is intentionally misleading, in that it does not even refer to the fact that this user could have avoided losing these files in several different ways, including simply by making a backup. This is about losing the ability to re-download and nothing else.

jboy55 8y ago

How much of this is Apple's fault and how much of it is the RIAA and MPAA's fault for enforcing this region based DRM structure where every possible use of media is split up and locked from each other. Oh, I was only able to purchase the rights to allow my users to download this movie in the USA until 01/20, English Canada until 6/19, Quebec until 1/19, UK until 1/22. Then, if the movie is still popular, the renewal rights for this movie will be bundled with 100s of other movies my users hate, all with different time periods and locations. If it isn't popular, it gets thrown into a bundle that will be forced upon content providers so net out a few extra $ on movies no one wants to see.

lgregg 8y ago

I wonder if there is anywhere on the internet where you can buy and download movie files. Of course, you can torrent them but that's illegal.

dj43nq 8y ago

I tend to think of these electronic “Purchase” transactions as a purchase of a temporary license. This mindset means the price should be significantly cheaper. You never really own these digital assets. A good test is trying to gift/sell something in your library to someone else.

matheusmoreira 8y ago

I think it is hilarious how copyright actively prevents content distribution companies from properly competing with piracy.

iamleppert 8y ago

The same thing happens if you owe them any money, however small. Right now I owe Apple $0.99 because I’m waiting on a new card to come and one of my recent previous purchases failed. Their response is to hold my entire library of “purchased” music and movies hostage until they get their $0.99. I can’t play or access anything. Clearly, I own nothing in their eyes. This is the same as if Blockbuster would hold all your DVDs hostage you bought from them if you owed them any money. If you don’t own the unrestricted physical medium, you own nothing. I guess there’s a reason Apple is dominant: aggression and brutality always win out in humanity. We are all just passive & submissive subordinates, Apple is our one true master and dark lord.

dymk 8y ago
> "... aggression and brutality always win out in humanity. We are all just passive & submissive subordinates, Apple is our one true master and dark lord" Have we reached peak melodrama on HN?
- sitepodmatt 8y ago
  To complete, add one oversensitive white male who feels offended by the word 'master' because slaves had masters.
lloeki 8y ago
> I guess there’s a reason Apple is dominant: aggression and brutality always win out in humanity How does that follow? Google, Facebook, Microsoft... are all equally heavy handed so I don't see how that makes Apple any more "dominant" than the other players in the field.

tzury 8y ago

Long before Apple Music subscription was available, I purchased dozens of albums and songs from iTunes. As the service become available, I joined it for about a year or so. One day I decided to cancel my Apple Music monthly subscription. As I did so, all the albums and songs I purchased prior to the Apple Music subscription simply vanished. That is to say, not only Obie’s, rather anything.

yason 8y ago

That's the reason I've never subscribed to any of the itunes, spotifys, or whatever services there are for music and video. I always went "Oh, I'll join a bit later when these services can be trusted as much as my local copies" and that never happened. In my opinion these "purchases" aren't really even "renting". Even renting has terms more solid than "Oh, we just had to take it away from you, sorry". Making things you've collected vanish would be extremely bad customer experience even in a free service, not to mention one that you actually pay for.

on_and_off 8y ago

This is why I use Play Music : I can upload my own tracks and download my library if need be. For games I largely favor GOG : all the games are playable even without their launcher (even though I use it) and you can back them up. For movies/series, is there such a solution ? apart from torrenting of course.

flukus 8y ago
> This is why I use Play Music : I can upload my own tracks and download my library if need be. This was to get easy adoption from people with existing music collections, don't be surprised when they cut this feature in future. With people growing up with spotify and the like I doubt it's even that important for new users anymore.
- on_and_off 8y ago
  if/when they cut it I will just download my library and bring it somewhere else, that's the whole point.

eric24234 8y ago

RMS is right. Long live RMS. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

spiorf 8y ago

Haha, "your" library...

fghtr 8y ago

Just in time before the International Day Against DRM. Act against it! https://www.defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm https://www.defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm